Wednesday, 20 April 2016

Planning Life After University

Fastly approaching the end of university, I have started to debate with myself about what my next step is. For a while I thought about doing a master but I don't want to rush into it and regret doing it in a few years time if I wanted to do a different masters.

Life in general seems so planned for people, you feel pressured not necessarily by people but by life to go straight from university into a graduate job and just never look back. This is fine for some people, maybe even homely and welcoming to them, but it just isn't me.

I just don't feel like I am cut out for an office job, I want a creative job where I will be active. Doing something that I love. This is what made me really start to think about my future and more than just my future furniture and house (yup I'm one of those people) and more into what I want to do. I realised I had never come up with a set idea, obviously an artist has always been the general idea, but I needed to expand on this.

From this I planned and planned thinking about my future, honestly it is exhausting thinking about this so much. I feel now is the time to tell you something you don't know. Back in the summer last year my grandad died and it stopped me being able to think about death, my artwork has always had a big focus on death in it and I just couldn't bring myself to think about death for months. I still haven't finished Allegiant (the last divergent book, as I knew the ending and couldn't face it).

I had to think of a different type of art to make, and I went into developing my doodles, I have always done doodles since I can remember. History notebooks with dueling snails and walking talking vegetables. My doodles became alive, I developed my doodles into characters, as cute as possible and then I took a huge step.

I have always been very self critical of my own work and scared of other people being the same, so it was massive when I decided to sell prints of my illustrations at a Handmade Fair at my university. I did really well and people seemed to like my work (I wasn't there for most of it, but my boyfriend manned my stand and sold a fair amount).

This gave me the confidence to continue with my characters and develop them more. An even bigger step came next, when I saw an advert around uni advertising about a pop up shop the uni was doing. I applied with my characters, had an interview and was selected. There was a few months till the shop, I spent a lot of this time making cards, hand-drawn cards. During this time I started to do artwork about death again, though it was video based and completely separate from my characters.

I found myself really loving drawing and coming up with new card designs (new characters), this is what I wanted to do, is what I found myself thinking. I started to research and found there are a few card companies that accept submissions but most are independent companies. This started me looking into creating my own company. This was something I found that I was passionate about much more than any job I had looked at.

Not to conclude as there never is an end in life and progression in it, but I guess what I'm saying is that you should do something that you are passionate about and not just for money or to have a job. You should do what you love and not to worry if you grow up not knowing what you want to do with your life. Give it time, I spent most of my time at university still not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up. I'm not saying life will be easy, as I'm sure just finding a random job would be a lot easier than what I want but I know that I have to try and live my dream. Even if it doesn't work out, at least I will know I tried.

No regrets in life is how you should live.

Thank you for reading this mega long post, I hope it has helped you and dare I say maybe even inspired one of you, if I am lucky.